Mozilla’s open and free alternative to Chrome’s web store is up and running. It might not be much to look at just yet, but it does show a lot of promise when it comes to how Mozilla will handle it’s own open web apps store. Developers who are interested in developing apps for the browser can do so very easily. The OWA Application Manifest is now stable, so there is no more worry about changing code or policy there.

Over at Mozilla Labs, they announced that they are no longer going to maintain the Prism project. For those of you who remember, Prism was Mozilla’s answer to the chrome-less browser. Something you could use to launch web applications (like Gmail) as a desktop application. The idea was to blur the line between desktop programs and online programs.

Open IT Online, an add-on for Firefox, delivers you what you want. Well, it delivers you what you want, if you are one of those people who love all these new Online services such as Zoho’s office applications or Google Docs. Open IT Online allows you to open your documents and images online without the need of any software to be installed.

Here are some of the extension types it can recognize and handle:

Documents (*.doc, *.rtf, *.odt, *.sxw)

Spreadsheets (*.xls, *.csv, *.ods, *.sxc)

Presentations (*.ppt, *.pps, *.odp, *.sxi)

Images (*.jpg, *.gif, *.png)

How do you use it? Well whenever you face a document with the “Open With” option, it will also give you the option to open it Online. From there you can choose one of the various Web 2.0 tools to view and edit the document in question.

One last really nice feature is that Open IT Online gives you the ability to also see the file size of the document you are about to view. This is handy in determining if you want to open the file, or not.

Come on, there has to be something useful the rest of the world (who doesn’t have an iPhone) can do with all these neat slim web apps that are coming out for the device, right? Looks like “the great themer” TwisterMC had the same idea:

Firefox’s sidebar is and odd place to load a web page, however if you manage your bookmarks, there will be an option to load any bookmark in your sidebar. The good news is that some iPhone applications can load and work in Firefox’s sidebar!